"Many definitions define what social capital is and what it does. In fact, there seems to be broader agreement in the literature about what social capital does, than what it is! In particular, it is widely agreed that social capital facilitates mutually beneficial collective action."

"Menand focuses on the elite institutions that still concentrate on providing an education in the arts and sciences, and argues that they have failed to respond to these and other painfully obvious problems because they remain stuck in patterns that were set a century and more ago. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he explains, scholars set out to create a limited free space in which they could set standards for the fields they practiced and for undergraduate and graduate training–a professional space dedicated, like the legal and medical professional spaces that took shape at the same time, to pursuing the general good rather than personal gain."

"Studies about productivity declines when working more than 40 hours a week surface with disturbing regularity. As a developer your creativity declines, you make more mistakes, you miss existing issue etc., to the point where you're doing more harm than good. Should I even mention the health concerns when you spend that much time engaged in the same activity (they even had rules about spending too much time at work in the Soviet Union, and those guys were all about putting in the time for the good of the people). What about diet, you can only survive on coke for so long – poor John couldn't even make it to 40."

"Readers are encouraged to fight RBP as they read it, rather than just soaking up the information. Although I claim this book is about “Best Practices”, the only reason that is true is that it’s a result of countless conversations with folks who are deep in the Ruby trenches getting stuff done. The only way for RBP to remain current and relevant is to continue these discussions, using its content as a jumping off point for fresh ideas."

"We investigate if the actions by individuals in creating effective new innovations are aligned with the reuse of those innovations by others in a private-collective software development context. …"

"At FloatingSheep, we're willing to search for and analyze almost anything that falls within the realm of human experience. Sometimes this is mundane (pizza) and sometimes it is contentious (abortion) but most of the time it falls somewhere in between. Such as, where can I get a drink?"

"In 2008 and 2009 exports of debt (the toxic stuff plus the nominally non-toxic stuff (US Treasuries)), only accounted for 3%.

It is common practice to ignore exports of debt when calculating America’s balance of trade. But, conceptually, there is not much difference between selling a foreigner or a foreign government a toxic synthetic CDO (that blows up in his face) and selling him a ship-load of genetically engineered soya-beans (or melamine tainted milk).

The logic for leaving exports of debt out of the calculation is presumably that at some point in the future the CDO that was “sold” will need to be paid back, which will require funds to flow out of USA into the pockets of foreigners, who may then decide to exchange those dollars for something else."

"Which neatly illustrates one major reason why, at the end of the day, I write this blog. Sitting down to keyboard with cigar and libation in hand does wonders to clarify not only my own thoughts on any particular subject, but also whether it rises to the level of something I might find interesting from another pen. If not, back to the woodpile it goes, where I can scavenge it for useful material later or consign it to the fireplace for fuel. The false starts, dead ends, and inchoate beginnings embodied in my unpublished oeuvre represent the very essence of active thought. Too bad I'll never let you see them in all their messy glory. If you did, you just might begin to believe that I don't really know what I'm talking about.<2>

Now, if you'll excuse me, I must get back to chasing those tops. I'll get back to you if I catch one that's interesting."

"Related, it reminded me a lot of Dan Pink’s thesis from Drive, and his TED talk, of the operators of the “new workforce”, are based in the intrinsic motivation associated with autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Seeing as how I spend far more time looking at the trends of business than of play, I realized…for me (and many others), work is a type of play.

From Nicole’s Four Keys of FUN, I’m proposing the Four Keys to Business.…"

"The place where I think Sloman is misguided is in his formulation of scientific models in an either/or way, as if, in truth, social variables are linked in simple causal paths, with a scientific goal of figuring out if A causes B or the reverse. I don't know much about intelligence, beer consumption, and socioeconomic status, but I certainly don't see any simple relationships between income, religious attendance, party identification, and voting–and I don't see how a search for such a pattern will advance our understanding, at least given current techniques. I'd rather start with description and then go toward causality following the approach of economists and statisticians by thinking about potential interventions one at a time. I'd love to see Sloman's and Pearl's ideas of the interplay between observational and experimental data developed in a framework that is less strongly tied to the notion of choice among simple causal structures."

"The first category is best termed Design as an Exploration of Production. This category is the largest in terms of the number of .MGX products it contains, and is made up of products whose central interest is an exploration of what rapid manufacturing technologies can produce, which conventional technologies cannot. It is typified by complex detailing on both the interior and exterior of the product, geometries which would be impossible to achieve were any form of tooling required."

"…each time you log a return visit to an establishment, you're registering a de-facto vote in favor of that good or service (an endorsement). Chances are you're not checking in at a restaurant that served you undercooked chicken last week. So establishments with the highest ratio of return visits by the same person are being collectively curated as well liked."

WORTH TATTOOING: “The adult human being simply knows too many solutions for problems that no longer exist.”

"So here we are. Mice with a genetic make-up that alters the diversity of their gut microbes get hungry, and that hunger makes them eat more. They get obese and suffer lots of other symptoms. Get rid of that particular set of microbes, and the mice lose their hunger and start to recover. And that distinctive diversity of microbes can, on its own, make genetically normal mice hungry–and thus obese, diabetic, and so on."

"To be honest, there’s not much to say about the Javascript example because it is so simple. We avoid the whole metaclass business because Javascript uses prototypal inheritance. This means that Javascript does not distinguish between classes/prototypes and instances and, therefore, we can add our desired behavior directly to the instance. We use the exact same technique for adding a method to the prototype, but this time we simply add the function directly to the instance. Again, this function is a closure. And again, this function has access to the instance’s state using this.…
Closures are so ingrained in the language’s design that metaprogramming seems to happen without even trying. This little exercise has left me very excited about the potential of Javascript not only as a great language for the web, but also as a powerful server-side language. You should be excited too."

"Now right now, consumers are facing a range of financial products, from student loans to credit cards to mutual funds, that are much more complicated than they faced in 1933. Some of this complication is innovation, some is meant to synthetically create opacity in the product innovating product differentiation, and some is just regulatory arbitrage. As Dan Geldon has written, the regime of disclosure has been turned into a weapon against consumers instead of the mechanism to let information and competition do its job. So it’s time to update that regime to handle the 21st century."

"Our conference system forces researchers to focus too heavily on quick, technical, and safe papers instead of considering broader and newer ideas. Meanwhile, we have devoted much of our time and money to conferences where we can present our research that we can rarely attend conferences and workshops to work and socialize with our colleagues.

Computer science has grown to become a mature field where no major university can survive without a strong CS department. It is time for computer science to grow up and publish in a way that represents the major discipline it has become."

"The effect of that “Yes, but…” is to make scholarly history complex and at the same time weaselly, uncertain and always whirling around to catch the interpretation sneaking up from behind.

The complexity that this creates is, of course, at odds both with the simplicity that Paul Krugman craved and that economics provided. It is at odds, as well, with the adversarial nature of the court room, in which opposing counsels must argue, without doubt or allowance for ambiguity, their side of the case. It is why Krugman was right to leave history behind, for that complex ambivalence is at the heart of the historical project. Staying with a subject whose central tenet he found repulsive would have been difficult, at best. It is why historians like Ambrose were wrong to testify for the tobacco companies, because their testimony came in service of an argument in which the essential equivocation was stripped away."

"This leads me to something else that I always find hard to articulate: the ROI of IndyHall, or even coworking in general.

We’ve been running IndyHall for nearly 3 years as a business for a reason, and a profitable one at that. But the metrics for ROI aren’t salient, since most of the investment has been in human, knowledge, and time capital, and the return doesn’t show up on our balance sheet. As such, Geoff and I don’t take a draw, at least not in terms of cash…because that’s not what’s we’ve invested. If there was a balance sheet for the social capital we’ve invested and seen in return, though, and we had metrics for it, we’d be able to far better express and share what we’ve accomplished."

"I've been trying to think of something to say about this, but haven't come up with anything that hasn't already been said, and I have to go teach for most of the rest of the day so I'll turn it over to you. What do you think of this argument from Bruce Bartlett about why Congress worked better from the 1930s to the 1970s than it does today?:…"

"Ask Why
Finally, and this is the most important thing I've learned, always ask why. When you see a blip in a graph, you should wonder why it's there. If you find some correlation, you should think about whether or not it makes any sense. If it does make sense, then cool, but if not, dig deeper. Numbers are great, but you have to remember that when humans are involved, errors are always a possibility."

"I was recently explaining all this to a colleague. To make my point, we Googled that question. Low and behold, there it was: asked and answered — verbatim — on Yahoo! Answers. How many legs does a fish have? Zero. Apparently Yahoo! Answers also knows the number of legs of a crayfish, rabbit, dog, starfish, mosquito, caterpillar, crab, mealworm, and “about 133,000″ more."